"Okay. I’ll do a search on my profile and posts for our interactions."
"They're going to ask how you felt during the in-person transaction. Any details you remember about the house, the garage, other vehicles on the property."
"I remember the garage pretty well." She wrapped her hands around her mug. "I was looking at the equipment. There were a lot of storage hooks on the wall. Empty hooks. Like things had been removed recently."
Rampage went still.
"What?" she said.
"Tell me about the hooks."
"I don't know. Just. Um, he had a whole pegboard wall, and about half the hooks were empty. I noticed it because the squat rack was the only big item left, and the garage felt stripped down. Like a moving situation."
"Did you think that at the time?"
"I thought. I thought maybe he was downsizing. People sell off gym equipment when they're moving." She looked at him. "That's bad, isn't it."
"It's information. Tell the agent exactly that. The hooks, the stripped-down feeling, all of it." He paused. "You have a good eye."
"I was looking at the equipment."
"You noticed something that didn't fit. Most people don't." He held her gaze. "That's not nothing."
She sat with that. With the small, uncomfortable pride of being told she'd seen something useful, tangled up with the knowledge of what it was she'd been seeing.
Savannah appeared in the kitchen doorway. "Makenzie's demanding to know if there's a French toast situation or if she has to make her own."
"There's eggs," Rampage said.
"She'll want French toast."
"Then she can make French toast."
"Rampage."
"The eggs are right there."
Savannah looked at Emily with the expression of a woman recruiting an ally. Emily looked at Rampage.
"You could make French toast," Emily said.
He looked at her.
"I'll help," she offered.
A long pause.
"Get the bread," he said.
Savannah disappeared to deliver the news. Thirty seconds later Makenzie could be heard from the common room making a sound of pure victory.
Emily got up to find the bread and Rampage moved to the stove, and they worked side by side in the kitchen in the particular comfortable silence of people who had figured out how to share a space, and at one point she reached past him for the cinnamon and he didn't move, and for a moment she was close enough to feel the warmth of him, and she took the cinnamon and stepped back and didn't say anything.
He didn't say anything either.
She handed him the cinnamon.
CHAPTER 15